The image above is a comic panel set in ancient Egypt.
Traditionally, ancient Egyptian art featured stylized people standing in profile. Ancient Greek art discovered and then focused on contrapposto, or a pose where, as described in the comic, a person places all their weight on one leg. It is considered an important phase in art history.
In the comic, a bunch of people are looking at one person who is leaning against a pillar. They are saying:
“Wow! Is that Heptup?” “He looks amazing.” “How was Greece, Heptup? You look really relaxed.”
Heptup, the person leaning on the pillar, says, “Yeah. I got into contrapposto over there. It’s where you put all your weight on one leg. I feel really dynamic.”
Two people on Heptup’s other side say:
“I love how his hips and shoulders aren’t parallel. He just looks so… alive.” “And so graceful.”
A final person speaks in two symbols placed vertically, which is a reference to Egyptian hieroglyphics, their writing system. The symbols he is saying are of a donkey, and of a person digging a hole with a shovel. It can be inferred he is saying something akin to “Bullshit.”
The joke scenario in the comic is one where ancient Egyptian people really did all stand rigidly like that, but one of the Egyptian people who traveled to Greece discovered contrapposto and now he leans on stuff and looks really cool. But the last guy isn’t impressed. It’s poking fun at art history.
slight alteration: the last person’s hieroglyphics say asshole (donkey + hole)
“I want to give people social and financial empowerment, so eventually people who want to come out won’t be affected. They will have their own social security system. It won’t make a difference if they are disinherited.”
It is great that he’s doing this, but it’s very disingenuous for a British newspaper to publish this and discuss section 377 as part of the homophobic climate of India without also mentioning that section 377 originates from British colonial rule. To mention this out of context and talk about cultural reasons for homophobia alone, portrays Indian culture as inherently homophobic but doesn’t take accountability for the way which Britain enforced the conditions for that climate to occur.
Neural networks are machine learning algorithms that are very good at solving tough problems – they’re used for language translation, facial recognition, and financial management. I, however, have been training them on silly datasets.
Here are some of my favorite experiments from the last year.
In a possible first for the field of machine learning, a neural network named rescue guinea pigs for the Portland Guinea Pig Rescue and Morris Animal Refuge. Some of the names they used, and some of them they did not.
Popchop Fuzzable Spockers Trickles Farter
Then I mixed the guinea pig names with the names of death metal bands, and got names such as:
Not to be outdone by the guinea pigs, AFK Cat Rescue of Huntsville, Alabama asked me to name some rescue kittens. Some of the names were great, and others not so much:
“I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” Her mother was packing by the black anthill. The sun was probably for his wife. Stop! I caused the Narguuse man who was new on Alabama, the screaming constipated eggs.
Wikipedia has a page where they list, for entertainment purposes, the titles of a bunch of pages that didn’t meet the cut. These are mostly pages that were submitted as pranks, although a few of them are clever enough that you can’t quite tell. Reader Emily Davis sent me a list of them – here are a few real deleted articles that humans wrote.
List of movie posters with lamps in them How to trick people into thinking you’re a wizard List of people who died with tortoises on their heads People Who delete My Articles have no sense of Humor Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! I like eggs Do scented candles burn faster than unscented candles An article that contains nothing but a full stop List of differences between apples and oranges Category:Farts in literature Category:Political posters using an octopus Woo woo woo woo woo woo wah ooooo wah List of all Wikipedia lists that do not contain themselves
It makes a terrible dataset for a neural network – only 1112 unique entries, some of which are quite long, and big variation in style and subject matter. I decided to try it anyway.
I trained a character-level recurrent neural network (that is, it uses individual letters as building blocks) with a very small memory to prevent it from memorizing the small dataset so quickly. Even so, most of the generated names were either incomprehensible or memorized from the original dataset. Those that weren’t, however, fit right in. It turns out text-generating neural networks are great at mashups and non sequiturs.
Popal chickens List of U.S. pants List of the Hamburgers Category:Athletes with maps Why Inited States Evil chicken Liquid cheese List of bands with pies on them Ant Fields are bear hair fetishism Monster Diseases Why Won’t Space Tire bear (country) What hoop This page is a very short article Poople who don’t have beer from sydney Goat that cookie Near Dogs Donkey words in the cartoons Poople who woo wah the pilot Death of chicken What is the day What fame butt List of fictional characters with the ball Who is not leaders List of parps Proper programming language Turdis programming language Article with a cat Friends and existence How to draw a coconut Tree donkey Category:People who can’t speed Panapple Beer for chickens Tree Wars Pants
Whoever it is who likes to enter long strings of repeated characters as pranks (I’m looking at you, Sand Person), the neural network shares your obsession. Repeated text is easier to learn, and so the neural network tends to latch onto it easily and, especially when I give it a short memory, takes repetition to even wilder excess (see: The Cow With No Lips).
I trained a neural network on the entire list of Wikipedia article titles a while back! It took a really long time, but it was totally worth it, because the output is frequently hilarious.
Here’s a sampling of some of the titles that it generated in some of my earlier runs:
Single and Engineering Act 1982
Alan Communication (Australian politician)
Discography de la di Corporation (American footballer)
The Antarctic Critics County County Team in the Love Days (California)
2004 Snake Cardinal Me For the Moon de Veesi
Harry Newbeast Group
Children of the Consortion (disambiguation)
Wool Controversington’s transport
List of Apple St Cannability Lines of Education Productions of San Meridontomy
Central Photon State Park
Want more? Check out the #wackypedia tag on my blog! Every once in a while, I’ll fire up the neural network and post new batches of the Wikipedian surrealism that it generates.
After seeing Mara Wilson’s tweet listing a bunch of imaginary British TV shows earlier today (and the even more amazing replies to it), I decided I had to take this to the obvious next step: training a neural network on a list of British TV shows and seeing what kind of nonsense came out.
I ended up using the Wikipedia article “List of British television programmes” as the training data, and here’s a sampling of what resulted. Some of these are far too absurd to be believable—but I can’t be the only one who had to double-check at least a few of these:
Mupperial Stophing – situation comedy
Peak Chally Life – drama
Jericle of the Trial – game show
Kitchen Maker Call – situation comedy
To the Crubbin Bad – animation/history, reality television/animated
Britain’s Next You King – sitcom
Beauty and the Come Gene – game show
Brief Mine – nature documentary
City Frones – documentary drama
Yell’s Fortune Satch – documentary/reality
Gamezil Hipwist – game show
Padfair – drama
The Gankstike – detective drama
Sunday Vision – comedy/crime drama
The Upper Serving – reality
Little Here – documentary
The Kringe – drama
Creasers – drama anthology
True Mr.Cry – situation comedy
Man to Mine of the Sony – drama
Million Pounders – drama
Keeping Smakes – game show
All Mysteries: The Pie the Meniss – medical drama
Crank Street – music/comedy
Dull Hour – situation comedy
Life on Balls of Sherlock Holmes – detective drama
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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